DEBUNKING THE CONSPIRACY THEORY

[Pizza]

Can we, just for the sake of moving things along in this thread at least, collectively agree that Jesus existed? Between Randy, His_Travesty, and Pious Paladin, I don't think we ever heard them defend the resurrection- unless I've missed it, which is entirely possible given my interest.

I don't think they want to get into it because of the glaring silliness.

Of course they never do. All they have is this stupid "wouldn't die for a lie" shit. Pious fraud in the real world is ignored.

[Nope]

Actually, about 75% of all NT scholars do accept this fact.

And obviously, not all of them accept the supernatural explanation.

75% of how many? This isn't helpful if the sample isn't representative of the population of historians and sampling bias is occurring.

What percentage of NT scholars are Christian? If they are religious than they already believe that Jesus is a god so they are not unbiased.

What percentage of Quran scholars believe the Quran is true? Would you accept a Muslim scholar who claims that djin must be real?

[Nope]

.

How can we discuss if the apostles were being dishonest or truthful when you haven't provided proof that they existed?

Tacitus references the death of the apostle James.

And why do you believe that you cannot accept the four canonical gospels as well as the Gospels of Thomas and Peter as historical sources? Bart Ehrman does.

Have you done some research that he has not done?

Please link to the document. What I have read is that he references what Christians believe but maybe you have a different document in mind

[Pizza]

75% of how many? This isn't helpful if the sample isn't representative of the population of historians and sampling bias is occurring.

What percentage of NT scholars are Christian? If they are religious than they already believe that Jesus is a god so they are not unbiased.

What percentage of Quran scholars believe the Quran is true? Would you accept a Muslim scholar who claims that djin must be real?

My point is he doesn't put the % in any context(there are historians who reject the resurrection as a historical view, for example Jesus Seminar). It's about as insightful as a commercial saying "four out of five doctors approve of."

[KevinM1]

Wait, wait, wait, wait... people won't die for a lie or delusion? Care to explain Jihad, then?

[Pizza]

Wait, wait, wait, wait... people won't die for a lie or delusion?  Care to explain Jihad, then?

Isn't it amazing how fundies can read the minds of the apostles and know what their motives were?

[Esquilax]

I'm happy to hear that you are not a mythicist, and this is in keeping with my opinion that you are a cut above much of the crowd here. When your blog is up, I'll be happy to check it out. One bit of advice...explain your position in small chunks...you don't want to fall victim to the dreaded TL;DR syndrome.

I write novels for a living; verbosity is very much a side effect of that.

The OP is based upon the work of J. Warner Wallace, a cold-case detective with a 20+ & 0 record solving murders that no one else managed to solve. You may have seen him on television...he's been on NBC's Dateline many times after solving various cases.

Googling him doesn't give me any information about the guy at all beyond his religious writings, which only have vague references to his profession. I did take a look at his most recent writings, which were cringe-worthy; the first article of his I read was an argument from ignorance regarding abiogenesis: scientists can't figure out where life came from, so it must be his god. This argument was sandwiched between a couple of plugs for his new book, and that was the least distasteful thing about it.

The other thing that sticks out to me is that his writing is shot through with the same things I had a problem with in the OP: lists of carefully arranged talking points to be knocked down, followed by a vague assertion that the hole the apologist thinks he's made can only be filled with his god. It doesn't matter to me if that style of argument comes from you, or from him, or from anyone, it's still a bad time. For one thing, you're never going to reach positive proof for the position you have through negative argumentation, so knocking down those talking points does nothing to get to the conclusion you've come to. More importantly, the talking points themselves are still just representations of the opposition by someone who disagrees with them, is it any wonder they they come out of his mouth looking easy to refute? Do you really think that the people who actually hold those positions have said nothing against these contentions?

Wallace never actually links out to people saying the words he attributes to the entire position, just as you never did; the whole argument takes place in an echo chamber where the only information allowed in comes care of a person with a vested interest in presenting the position in a certain way. Case in point, when I read an article from Wallace talking about fine tuning, at every single point that he purports to rebut, I found myself with a ready made response, filled with information that seems to have been meticulously groomed out of Wallace's presentation of what the argument is. I also had another argument against fine tuning that his supposed rebuttal of all the possible explanations for it did not have; though he says that he's written a comprehensive response to every explanation for fine tuning that scientists have, he's left one out, and only half explained the ones he did bother to write about.

Of course, because the argument itself is a hermetically sealed presentation that doesn't allow for, or include, input from those who actually hold the positions he's responding to, I can't step in and say that actually, there's more here than he's letting on. That's the thing I object to, this one way street of argumentation where the apologist speaks for his opposition as well as his own case; there's no possible way that's fair, and if there was any interest in making the discussion fair, then the position being rebutted would be composed of the words of those that actually hold it, rather than one sided "explanations" of what it is, solely in the words of the apologist.

Wallace WAS an atheist (his father still is, btw), and he decided to apply his skills as a detective to the evidence of an ancient death. Guess what? He was convinced by the evidence that Christianity is true.

I always flinch when I hear stuff like that; the "I was an atheist once!" gambit is something used by apologists under the fallacious assumption that it lends credence to their ideas. It doesn't, and I never seen a single apologist say that, and actually understand even basic facts about modern atheism.

Wallace is ANOTHER example of someone who was NOT raised in a believing household being convinced by the FACTS and apologetics arguments.

If his writings constitute the things that convinced him of christianity, then he wasn't convinced for good reasons, I gotta tell you.

So, is Wallace speaking FOR his opponents unfairly when he lays out the five factors that he uses to this very day when dealing with conspiracies? Not only is his approach to breaking conspiracies valid, but the arguments for atheism that he challenges WERE his own at one time.

Oh? They were? How do you know that?

I'm an atheist, who doesn't hold to the conspiracy theory, so we can establish from the get go that those arguments are not held by all atheists. In fact, one could be an atheist without having any arguments at all, so simply saying that he was once an atheist doesn't tell us whether he actually accepted the arguments he's refuting now; in fact, from what I can find detailing Wallace's conversion, it happened as a result of a forensic analysis of the biblical narrative as a purported witness account. Now, I have some issues with the conclusion Wallace reached as a result of that, but the point is that, seemingly by his own account, Wallace didn't convert because his conspiracy theory leanings were debunked. His writings on that theory were written, I think, after his conversion, not before.

If you have some writings from Wallace prior to his conversion (which I searched for, but could not find) that establish that he was once a conspiracy theorist then that's all well and good, but the assertion that he was so because he was an atheist isn't a safe one to make otherwise.

I'm not. I'm open to hearing any explanations you may have to offer. I think there are only half a dozen or so REASONABLE alternatives (I may cover them all one thread at a time), and Habermas says he has identified 14 alternative theories.

But it is reasonable for me to ask what your working hypothesis is and to examine (with you?) whether it is better than the Christian theory. Don't you agree?

True, just so long as we agree that the absence of a counter-explanation doesn't lend any credence to yours.

But as I said before, I don't think that your minimal facts require an explanation, in that they don't at all lead to the conclusion you're presenting.

[Randy Carson]

Tacitus references the death of the apostle James.

And why do you believe that you cannot accept the four canonical gospels as well as the Gospels of Thomas and Peter as historical sources? Bart Ehrman does.

Have you done some research that he has not done?

Please link to the document. What I have read is that he references what Christians believe but maybe you have a different document in mind

This book, written by an atheist who is also a world-class scholar, is devastating to mythicists:

http://www.amazon.com/Did-Jesus-Exist-Hi...B0053K28TS

Tacitus: pp 54-56
Josephus: pp 57-66

"Once is it conceded that the Gospels can and should be treated as historical sources, no different from other historical sources infused with their authors' biases, it starts to become clear why historians have almost universally agreed that whatever else one might say about him, Jesus of Nazareth lived in first-century Palestine and was crucified by the prefect of Judea. It is not because "the Gospels say so" and that it mst therefore be true. It is for a host of other reasons to scholars who work in the field." (Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, 74-75)

[Randy Carson]

Wait, wait, wait, wait... people won't die for a lie or delusion?  Care to explain Jihad, then?

Kevin-

You're either not paying attention or not thinking or both.

It has been said by me and others MANY times that people die for their belief all the time.

What is not common is for people to lay down their lives for what they know to be a lie.

If the apostles made up the story of Jesus' resurrection, then they KNEW is was a lie. No one dies for what they know are lies.

[Randy Carson]

I'm happy to hear that you are not a mythicist, and this is in keeping with my opinion that you are a cut above much of the crowd here. When your blog is up, I'll be happy to check it out. One bit of advice...explain your position in small chunks...you don't want to fall victim to the dreaded TL;DR syndrome.

I write novels for a living; verbosity is very much a side effect of that.

The OP is based upon the work of J. Warner Wallace, a cold-case detective with a 20+ & 0 record solving murders that no one else managed to solve. You may have seen him on television...he's been on NBC's Dateline many times after solving various cases.

Googling him doesn't give me any information about the guy at all beyond his religious writings, which only have vague references to his profession. I did take a look at his most recent writings, which were cringe-worthy; the first article of his I read was an argument from ignorance regarding abiogenesis: scientists can't figure out where life came from, so it must be his god. This argument was sandwiched between a couple of plugs for his new book, and that was the least distasteful thing about it.

The other thing that sticks out to me is that his writing is shot through with the same things I had a problem with in the OP: lists of carefully arranged talking points to be knocked down, followed by a vague assertion that the hole the apologist thinks he's made can only be filled with his god. It doesn't matter to me if that style of argument comes from you, or from him, or from anyone, it's still a bad time. For one thing, you're never going to reach positive proof for the position you have through negative argumentation, so knocking down those talking points does nothing to get to the conclusion you've come to. More importantly, the talking points themselves are still just representations of the opposition by someone who disagrees with them, is it any wonder they they come out of his mouth looking easy to refute? Do you really think that the people who actually hold those positions have said nothing against these contentions?

Wallace never actually links out to people saying the words he attributes to the entire position, just as you never did; the whole argument takes place in an echo chamber where the only information allowed in comes care of a person with a vested interest in presenting the position in a certain way. Case in point, when I read an article from Wallace talking about fine tuning, at every single point that he purports to rebut, I found myself with a ready made response, filled with information that seems to have been meticulously groomed out of Wallace's presentation of what the argument is. I also had another argument against fine tuning that his supposed rebuttal of all the possible explanations for it did not have; though he says that he's written a comprehensive response to every explanation for fine tuning that scientists have, he's left one out, and only half explained the ones he did bother to write about.

Of course, because the argument itself is a hermetically sealed presentation that doesn't allow for, or include, input from those who actually hold the positions he's responding to, I can't step in and say that actually, there's more here than he's letting on. That's the thing I object to, this one way street of argumentation where the apologist speaks for his opposition as well as his own case; there's no possible way that's fair, and if there was any interest in making the discussion fair, then the position being rebutted would be composed of the words of those that actually hold it, rather than one sided "explanations" of what it is, solely in the words of the apologist.

Wallace WAS an atheist (his father still is, btw), and he decided to apply his skills as a detective to the evidence of an ancient death. Guess what? He was convinced by the evidence that Christianity is true.

I always flinch when I hear stuff like that; the "I was an atheist once!" gambit is something used by apologists under the fallacious assumption that it lends credence to their ideas. It doesn't, and I never seen a single apologist say that, and actually understand even basic facts about modern atheism.

Wallace is ANOTHER example of someone who was NOT raised in a believing household being convinced by the FACTS and apologetics arguments.

If his writings constitute the things that convinced him of christianity, then he wasn't convinced for good reasons, I gotta tell you.

So, is Wallace speaking FOR his opponents unfairly when he lays out the five factors that he uses to this very day when dealing with conspiracies? Not only is his approach to breaking conspiracies valid, but the arguments for atheism that he challenges WERE his own at one time.

Oh? They were? How do you know that?

I'm an atheist, who doesn't hold to the conspiracy theory, so we can establish from the get go that those arguments are not held by all atheists. In fact, one could be an atheist without having any arguments at all, so simply saying that he was once an atheist doesn't tell us whether he actually accepted the arguments he's refuting now; in fact, from what I can find detailing Wallace's conversion, it happened as a result of a forensic analysis of the biblical narrative as a purported witness account. Now, I have some issues with the conclusion Wallace reached as a result of that, but the point is that, seemingly by his own account, Wallace didn't convert because his conspiracy theory leanings were debunked. His writings on that theory were written, I think, after his conversion, not before.

If you have some writings from Wallace prior to his conversion (which I searched for, but could not find) that establish that he was once a conspiracy theorist then that's all well and good, but the assertion that he was so because he was an atheist isn't a safe one to make otherwise.

I'm not. I'm open to hearing any explanations you may have to offer. I think there are only half a dozen or so REASONABLE alternatives (I may cover them all one thread at a time), and Habermas says he has identified 14 alternative theories.

But it is reasonable for me to ask what your working hypothesis is and to examine (with you?) whether it is better than the Christian theory. Don't you agree?

True, just so long as we agree that the absence of a counter-explanation doesn't lend any credence to yours.

But as I said before, I don't think that your minimal facts require an explanation, in that they don't at all lead to the conclusion you're presenting.

Read his book. Then decide.